" He guessed that Pinecoffin would want
some broad, free-hand work after his niggling, stippling, decimal details.
Pinecoffin handled the latest development of the case in masterly style, and
proved that no "popular ebullition of excitement was to be apprehended."
Nafferton said that there was nothing like Civilian insight in matters of this
kind, and lured him up a bye-path--"the possible profits to accrue to the
Government from the sale of hog-bristles." There is an extensive literature of
hog-bristles, and the shoe, brush, and colorman's trades recognize more
varieties of bristles than you would think possible. After Pinecoffin had
wondered a little at Nafferton's rage for information, he sent back a
monograph, fifty-one pages, on "Products of the Pig." This led him, under
Nafferton's tender handling, straight to the Cawnpore factories, the trade in
hog-skin for saddles--and thence to the tanners. Pinecoffin wrote that
pomegranate-seed was the best cure for hog-skin, and suggested--for the past
fourteen months had wearied him--that Nafferton should "raise his pigs before
he tanned them."
Nafferton went back to the second section of his fifth question.
How could the exotic Pig be brought to give as much pork as it did in the West
and yet "assume the essentially hirsute characteristics of its oriental
congener?" Pinecoffin felt dazed, for he had forgotten what he had written
sixteen month's before, and fancied that he was about to reopen the entire
question.
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